I spend a long time bemoaning some mythical past of New York City… well actually, it’s not that mythical, it’s my past. I miss SoHo back in it’s hey day, when people were serious about art and living where they showed and Fanelli’s was always right around the corner. You’d meet people and go see their studios and drink wine, and they’d photograph you in your painted shoes, if you wore painted shoes and hat… and I did… These things happen to some extent in Dumbo and WillyB, but the real power is in Chelsea and nothing ever happens there, but snubs and shitty attitude. I miss the hookers lined up down Madison Avenue in furs and hot pants looking for coke and money for more coke and disco… I miss the funky galleries that mattered… Castelli’s was pretty funky compared to the Spa-like atmosphere of todays kunst palaces…. Ivan Karp’s Ok Harris was funky and smokey… it still is smokey, but suspiciously clean… Allan Stone was a chaotic view inside one man’s brilliant, compulsive, manic collecting mind…. it was beyond funky and an argument for gallery as art object…. now it looks more or less like Tiffany’s… which is nice, but somehow the art suffers for the artist… I’m well aware that people who buy art, can’t generally see it, unless it is in a frame on a clean wall… you can sell anything in a frame on a clean wall… for artists it is different… spotting the gold in the mud… the diamond in shit… digging through the chaos for order…that is the general job description and I liked how the old New York worked like that… in Galleries, in nightlife, in culture, in relationships… whatever.
That said, It is a sort of facinating time to live in New York now. All eyes are on us… architecture wise… there is a moment (God, I hate to agree of with Trump on anything, but please spare us that Childress mess of a sky wire, Hollywood flat front empty, tall gesture of nothing he calls architecture… Give me back my sky line Zip duality! Let’s do the Think project at least). One of the terrible things about 911 from an urban point of view, is that they’d just got that waterfront area about finished and it was starting to feel like a world class bit of urban planning and the towers on their super block worked! They were the two poles of a giant magnate (you couldn’t see the burried arch connecting them, but it more or less existed underground) that drew downtown together. It’s going to be another fucking decade before they get all the feng shui right again, if they ever do…. too many comittees… and please, more or less leave the victims families out of it. Let them mourn at home, like the rest of us who are mourning something. I don’t want to be insensitive, but good intentions nearly lost us the Vietnam memorial (I still hat that fucking bronze bad rip off of Rodin with fatigues on)…. and gave us the God Awful WWII memorial… So just nicely push them asside, because a city lives on it’s future and if we can build on the African graveyard, we can build on this too. Period. Stop.
So it’s not ony Manhattan. Yesterday at Coney (in deed plans abound for all of Brooklyn’s waterfront) they were announcing the prize winners for a new developement around the parachute drop from the ’39 worlds fair… we call it the B.K. Eiffel Tower. They made this poor kid wear a plastic sign around his neck that said, “Winner”… it gave him the look of the exact opposite…. he should have been at the “Shoot the Freak” booth wearing a cone, if you know what I mean.
I think the old lady needs a face lift. Many are bemoaning the cleaning up of a place that since the sixties, or seventies (when I started going for some bizarre reason with my mom and brothers…it was pretty seedy in the seventies and I could never figure out what my otherwise timid mother was thinking) part of its charm has been its very decrepitude… the decaying jet coaster (now gone) with a house under it (Annie Hall) and overgrown with REM Georgia Kudzu of something…. wild dogs and drunk Vietnam Vet squatting there with a lawn chair and forty ounce of Bud… It was like Providence used to be: one big movie set, waiting for the actors and crew and cameras and a story…. you and your head were the story… a coney island of the mind, in deed.
Being a fan of modernism, I always had a weak spot for the roof line and material use on this sports facility building. I have no idea when it was built, but it always stood out as a fairly good architectural moment in place full of disasters ever since Luna Park burnt down… all the International style, Stalinist brick shit towers they built there are the single worst example of fucking up Waterfront views in the history of New York… no the world!
It seems that most of the new rest rooms, first aid stations (with their perfect Swiss crosses) and showers, etc. take their cues from the roof of this building (which is in shit shape, by the way) they all have that aluminum, or whatever metal roof…If anyone knows some history on this building please leave comments… it’s always stuck out on the boardwalk as a modern moment…
I have a feeling the new Coney will be a fine example of urban plannning and architectural seriousness… but we’ll all miss the crazy chaos we grew up with… the freak shows… the toughs…For everything you gain, you loose. I recommend you summer in Coney this year… it will all be changing at the end of the season … it will be cleaned up and sanitized and we’ll only have ghosts of our summers and rain-wet winters to haunt us… and go on huanting us:
This should probably bring us to Bloomberg and the West Side Stadium and his ego and his bid for the Olympics (which he has now glued to the side of the subways which kills me), but it was raining and I wanted to get home… besides Bloomberg is the first mayor in a while who really understands the importance of art and artists and culture in general to a city…so I don’t feel like beating up on him… He’s allowing the Un-Parade next Wednesday downtown… so he gets a pass. There’s a boat that’s leaving soon for New York… come aboard, that’s where we belong, Sister!
